


Cold Spirit

by JaskiersPantaloons



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Fairy Tale Curses, Gen, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28216392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaskiersPantaloons/pseuds/JaskiersPantaloons
Summary: Jaskier couldn’t go on like this, he knew. He was only mortal, and this was a killing cold.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 19
Kudos: 163





	Cold Spirit

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yule!

It was snowing.

Jaskier knew that was an uncreative way to describe the way the blizzard sent driving winds to scour the snows from the road before they could settle, so that the ground was bare dirt but the air was thick with white fury. He knew he should have some clever turn of phrase to explain exactly how the snow felt as the wind drove it into his face— his cheeks, his eyes— sharp little pricks of bright pain that felt almost like a stray ember from a hearth fire until the little warmth left in his skin melted the snowflakes and they were nothing but bitter, empty cold.

“A poet,” he had been told by this lecturer and that, “Can always describe things to the highest degree of accuracy and beauty.”

Well, he thought, no one could describe the numbness of his fingertips despite the gloves he wore inside loose hide mittens. The village head woman had forced him to take them when he would not stay longer than the week in Byi. He’d thought he would be fine, with winter barely come.

He should have listened, he knew, but it was a cold thought. He had no warmth for fury, not even self fury, nor room in his heart for anything but the sluggish beat of his pulse as his body fought to keep going against the blizzard’s fury.

He kept on, because at least the road cut a tack against the wind, rather than feeding him into the storm’s direct force, and because he was fairly sure that if he stopped, he’d realize he had already frozen solid and simply _perish_.

His bootleather was cracking in the cold, and he’d stopped and crammed and extra three pairs of socks on when he’d found a little rock formation that had a sheltered cubby on its leeward side.

Possibly, he should have made up a camp there, but at the time he’d believed he was less than an afternoon’s walk to the next village.

At the time, it probably had been, as he hadn’t had to contend with the blizzard sapping away at his strength and his will and his _words_ and keeping him from his destination.

Now, the sun was setting, he thought. The white of the driving snow was certainly grayer than it had been, and it had been at least several hours since that quick stop. He had no idea how much further the village of Byi was. It could be leagues away, or he could be a pace away from the alewife’s garden gate, and he would never know it.

The road turned, and Jaskier felt it under his feet, stumbling. When he made to turn with it, the wind hit him full on, pushing him back a pace and freezing his breath in his lungs, making his eyes tear up and then freezing those tears in his eyelashes.

“Fuck,” he gasped out.

He couldn’t go on like this, he knew. He was only mortal, and this was a killing cold.

The wind pressed, and he took another step back, hitting a tree that hovered cautiously over the road. Jaskier dug his mittened fingers into the bark, feeling nothing at all, yet somehow more alive than he had minutes before.

The tree felt more real than the wind, or the stiff cold skin on his face. He clung to it, and his sanity, desperately.

Time passed strangely, in the cold. He knew, intellectually, that the cold-sickness slowed the heart and the blood, and that probably had something to do with it. A man was, after all, used to his own heartbeat to count the time.

Briefly, he thought of a man with the slowest of heartbeats, but as always he steered his thoughts away from that. It was an old wound now, scarred over and ignored except for tall tales of might and magic and bravery.

After several wasted seconds leaning against the tree, it occurred to Jaskier that there might be some shelter on the far side of it. The tree had doubtless withstood many blizzards, to be so tall this close to a road. Perhaps it would give him a chance at withstanding this one.

He darted behind the tree like the wind might _literally_ chase him, and he felt immediately better.

The woods before them were sheltered slightly from the full force of the brutal storm, and snow was starting to cling to the edges of bark and twigs and branches despite the way the wind pulled at the sparkling flakes.

He could breathe again, he realized, and he sucked a deep breath: cold enough to make his lungs spasm, but not torn away from him too soon to make a difference. When he exhaled, the wind snatched the fog of his breath away, but not so quickly he never saw it.

He knew now that he’d never make it to the town before dark, but the edge of the wood here was safer than the road itself, and he thought that if he just wandered a bit deeper, he might have luck enough to survive the night.

He took off a mitten to get at his knife, then redonned it and folded the knife clumsily into his palm. He started by slashing the tree with the mark he’d adopted, a starburst with a longer slash just below, as a stem. He remembered the look on Geralt’s face when he’d decided on it, remembered more the ambient warmth of the glowing campfire and the wool cloak Geralt had made him buy secondhand.

Geralt’s own mark was a double triangle, pointing up at a half circle. When Geralt had suggested that Jaskier might like a simpler blaze, Jaskier had simply huffed indignantly and pointed at Geralt, too annoyed by the hypocrisy for words.

A theme of their long acquaintance, really.

He passed another tree and marked it too, cursing the way the knife slipped in his crude mittens. The mark was very shallow, and might be invisible. If Jaskier had clothes to spare and thumbs free to tie with, he might have flagged the trail in silk scraps instead.

He grit his teeth and slipped deeper into the trees.

About half an hour further on, he spied a large stone cairn with a strange construction; several stones stacked tall, and then one much wider than the rest balanced atop them.

There was something strange and otherworldly about the structure, and he shuddered in revulsion, sudden sweat popping up at his temples and immediately freezing. He took a step back, and then another, and veered slightly to the east so he wouldn’t cross within 50 feet of it.

Once he’d sidled past the strange little monument, he felt markedly warmer, and he straightened his spine and took former steps. The wood was deep and growing darker even than the blizzard could explain as the sun sank behind an invisible horizon, but he could see further than his nose and he wasn’t on the verge of freezing on the spot.

He allowed himself to consider that he might yet survive this and be able to come up with better descriptions of that deadly, killing cold after all.

He brushed aside the dead-looking bracken from what might have been a berry bush in the warmth of summer but in the here and now just looked like so much frozen brittle death. There was a scant little niche in the heart of the thorny brush, and he thought the branches would be better shelter than nothing at all, so he knelt to be sure he would fit.

On his knees, his strength left him and he groaned aloud. Okay, he thought. Fine. I shall just camp here for the night, and if by some miracle I do wake up in the morning, I’ll continue on then.

The wind _shrieked_ , blowing hard enough to make the trees crack, but he was low to the ground and sheltered by undergrowth.

He dropped the knife, but couldn’t muster any strength to put it away, so instead he kicked it further away so he wouldn’t accidentally cut himself with it.

He was already wearing every scrap of cloth he owned, so there was no need to unpack a cold camp. Instead, he shouldered off his pack and his lute, hoping for a moment that the cold hadn’t gotten into the wood and made it brittle. He pillowed his head on his arm and made a token effort to adjust the layers of his clothing around him so he was covered to the most advantage, but exhaustion and cold tumbled him into a deep unconsciousness before he could even cover his eyes.

***

The first Geralt knew something was wrong—

Well. The first Geralt knew something was wrong was when the elder of the tiny village of Byigd had grabbed his hand and looked into his eyes and said, “You’re needed further north, in Byi.”

Geralt had extracted his hand and stared at her, expecting the intimidation to elicit more helpful information.

It did more often than not, though he could admit that it was not nearly as effective as charm and flirtation, he had not the faculty or the patience for that.

She looked up at the clouded winter sky, unintimidated, and a gust of wind caught at her dark hair and pulled it gently from its braids. She shook her head, then met Geralt’s gaze again, smiling somewhat wryly.

“You’re needed. Witchers bring balance where there is none, do they not?”

“I kill monsters,” Geralt said. After a moment of her expectant silence, he added: “For coin.”

She shrugged. “The difference is only in the details, and paying for a service is a balance all its own.”

Geralt hadn’t sighed then, but he did now. There was a reason he didn’t usually range out this far, and especially so late into winter. The Continent did have some strange corners, and it wasn’t his job to think about them.

Jaskier would have. He had a nearly perfect memory for tales and stories and what he called “The Mythos”; the ways those stories and tales all twined together to affect the thoughts and behaviors of the people who told them to each other.

He didn’t much care about that sort of knowledge, since it was hardly going to save his life if a bruxa decided to eat him, but Jaskier was good at it all. Well. If you counted how he used nonsense stories to convince half the Continent not to spit on Witchers.

Which Geralt did, of course: he wasn’t ungrateful. He just didn’t show it where Jaskier could notice.

Of course, these days that meant that he could appreciate the skill publicly and however often he liked. Which was good.

He preferred it that way.

Thoughts of what the village elder might have meant about balance chased him all the way up to Byi, and he even had a letter composed in his head, ready to send to the errant bard, care of Oxenfurt University.

He’d never write it down, of course, but it was all right to imagine Jaskier’s reply, he had decided.

Byi was not terribly distinguishable from Byigd, which made a certain sense. The village elder was younger, and wore her hair loose. There was snow on the air, here, and the strange heavy closeness that draped the world just before a snowstorm. All the small creatures were hunkering into dens and nests and hollows to wait out the cold heralded by the sharp short gusts and the ozone taste of the air.

“I was told you needed a Witcher,” he told her.

She eyed him appraisingly, hair tangling in her face. She didn’t brush it aside, and Geralt glanced uneasily at the door to the room at the front of her half-buried turf house that, based on its size relative to the other turf houses, would serve as bar and inn and meeting room however the town needed.

She did not take his meaning and suggest they go indoors.

He shrugged mentally, used to such.

“I think maybe,” she said. 

Geralt bit back an impatient growl.

She grinned at him suddenly, and he resisted the urge to take a step back.

“There’s been a spirit of the cold coming far too close to town lately. I think, perhaps, you should not hunt it during a blizzard.”

“You know what it looks like?” he asked. He tried to run through what he knew of the area. There were actually quite a few monsters in this part of the continent that could be considered “spirits of the cold”, and he wasn’t ready to go hunting any of those this late in the season with only a torch and silver and a hope that one of those would kill it.

“Does the wind have a shape? It is cold. It slows the heart and the mind but the victim thinks they are very warm and very clever, and then they die.”

Geralt sighed. She’d just described cold-sickness, which he couldn’t fight. Well; not as a Witcher fights. Anyone could fight cold-sickness with fire and a good blanket and, in extreme cases, shared body warmth.

She shrugged at his expression.

“Has anyone witnessed it killing?” he asked anyway.

“It took the woodcutter the day before last.”

And with that, she took him to meet the woodcutter’s daughter and son-in-law, and then he had enough information to suss out the place where the man had died.

He glanced at the sky, and the elder gave him a half smile. “You should wait until the storm passes.”

“Any signs will be destroyed by the blizzard,” he said.

“You’ll be destroyed by the blizzard,” she countered, and he relented, letting her show him a place by the fire in her common room to unroll his bed and a hook to hang his outerwear upon.

She even fed him, which was somewhat of a refreshing experience, and Geralt felt quite content to fall asleep.

The next day dawned with howling winds and whiteout conditions he could see only by peering through the cracks near the hinge of the door. The elder snorted at him and handed him a bit of straw, which he stuffed into the hole before turning back to her.

The room was chilled despite the fire, and he wondered if the little structure might be better off without the fireplace in the center for the wind to draw all the heat out from.

“Does every house have a chimney?” he asked around mid morning, when the comfortable silence started to itch.

The wind howled fury, as if to reply to him.

“We build them on a slant,” she said, “and line them with little steps. The wind finds it hard to get in.”

He suspected the smoke would also find it hard to get out, but then, he of all people understood the compromises one made in the interests of survival.

He thought about Jaskier again, and wondered if Jaskier would be telling her a ridiculous tale, or if a listening mood would have struck him already, and if he would have had this taciturn elder telling Jaskier some legend from her grandmother’s time instead.

He looked at her.

He could ask her, he thought. He could hear it from her without Jaskier.

But without a bard to memorize it instantly, what was the point of a story?

The wind shifted, and snow hissed as it skittered against the outside of the house, like something driven to come inside with them.

He shivered, involuntarily.

She glanced at him.

She eventually left to busy herself with the chores of the midday meal, and he slumped against the wall, meditating in between bursts of furious wind.

He had a slowly rising urge to leave.

She kept stealing glances at him, which made him twitchy and nervous, and he thought if he could just get out of the common room, he’d be fine. He could shelter in a barn or—

He couldn’t. He knew there was no place in the tiny town of Byi for him outside of this common room. He forced himself to stillness, and somehow he managed to meditate.

Dinner brought with it more than mere restlessness. His legs twitched with impatience, his hands drilling patterns on the trestle table where they shared their meal. He could barely sit with proper posture, despite imagining Vesemir’s displeasure at his manners.

Finally, the elder sighed and then she patted his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

And then she went to the hook his warmest surcote and his cloak hung upon, and gestured him to stand. Mute and numb, he let her dress him like an errant child, and he took his gloves from her, as well as the knitted hat and scarf she unearthed from a basket in the far corner. They were chilled from the cold that seeped through the walls.

“If I try to stop you any longer,” she said in a tone of one explaining things, “You’ll leave without dressing. At least this way you might survive.”

He stared at her. She was evicting him? Into this weather? He’d had crueler rejections, he was sure.

He just couldn’t think of any.

“Sit by the fire,” she advised. “At least, as long as you can.”

He sat. She picked up a bit of knitting and, frowning, set to swiftly working through the fabric.

Geralt fidgeted more, the restless feeling creeping up from his legs to his guts to his lungs. Any longer sitting idle so close to the fire, and he knew he’d start sweating, which was a sure route to cold-sickness.

He stood up.

She met his eyes. He realized, suddenly, that she and the elder in Byigd both had, and he wondered about that. Even the people Jaskier had convinced of his fictional heroics couldn’t stand to meet his monstrous gaze for very long.

“I’m sorry,” she offered.

He shook his head. “I don’t think this is your fault,” he said, though he had no idea what “this” was.

“I did pray for the cold spirit to find balance again,” she said. “So it might be, a little.”

She smiled, and, without thinking about the fact that he wasn’t entirely in control of his faculties, he opened the door.

The wind screamed at him and tore at his clothes, but he wore sturdy things, as nice as he could afford when roaming this far north in winter.

Lacking direction, he headed out of town, back in the direction of Byigd, following the path of the woodcutter he had determined the day before. The blizzard made it so an ordinary man couldn’t make out anything, but his eyes could see just a bit further, making out shapes as much from where the snow couldn’t blow as from actually seeing through the wall of snow.

The solid packed snow on the roadway showed mud in traces at the edge, and the night was dark and moonless.

He followed the road until it curved, and the wind lessened from its constant pressure against his back. There— he could actually see the trunks of trees here, with the way the road and wind intersected, and on the far side of the tree, a waymark.

The woodcutter, he thought, reaching up to trace the outline of it with gloved fingers starting to numb from cold.

He didn’t need his touch to be up to its normal sensitivity to discern a rather straightforward starburst cut deep into the bark. He considered, for the first time, why he was even out here. The man who had made that mark was dead, and the only thing he would meet out here was the same death from the cold-sickness.

The brief rational thought melted away, and he stepped off the road, fingers brushing tree trunks until he found another starburst blaze, and another, and another.

His medallion hummed against his chest, and he thought of turning toward the danger. Something else drew him, though, and he found the next blaze, and the next, and then he realized he’d been wrong about the waymarks.

A starburst, sure, but beneath that, a curved slash, like a stem.

His sluggish mind churned that knowledge through to its inevitable outcome, and he stilled abruptly, feeling, for the first time, the bitter cold, the unnaturalness of the storm.

His medallion had warned him. Hadn’t it? He could _just_ remember...

But if the cold spirit was real, and had wanted to bait him with Jaskier, why had he not noticed the distinctive part of the mark sooner? Other things had stood out clearly in the fury of the storm; the edge of the road, the screaming wind permeating the turf house, but not the slashed dandelion that Jaskier used.

It might be coincidence. Perhaps the woodcutter had wanted to distinguish his own star from someone else’s. Perhaps he also had a romantic heart that fancied the design to be a flower, though perhaps not a dandelion.

It didn’t matter. Geralt may have known he was caught in some magical torpor, but there wasn’t much he could do but stumble forward, following the blazed trees.

***

Snow fell gently onto Jaskier’s bare face, tickling him into a groggy sort of wakefulness that was not at all like being awake.

He opened his eyes.

A man stood on the other side of a tumble of bare-branched bushes, shirtless and white-haired.

Jaskier’s breath caught in his chest, and he was suddenly very awake. 

It didn’t make a lick of sense, but he had, once, been forever stumbling over Geralt of Rivia wherever he went. Perhaps it was a poetic twist of Destiny that had led Geralt to stumble over him instead this time.

“Geralt, put your shirt back on, you great oaf. It’s colder than a witch’s tits out here, which you really ought to know, given your propensity for—“

The man turned. He was graceful, and not in the sheer physical way that Geralt was always graceful. His hair shifted against the bare skin of his shoulders, and Jaskier realized it was too long and well-kept to belong to Geralt, and the muscular bare back hadn’t a single scar on it.

Then, his eyes met Jaskier’s, and instead of the warm, mutagenic yellow cats’ eyes he knew as well as his own hands, they were a changing, changeable gray, the same color as the low-hanging clouds that obscured the daylight.

Jaskier jerked away.

“You could have died,” the man said neutrally. “Most know not to travel when they can smell a storm on the wind.”

“I’ve been heeding my own instincts for decades now,” Jaskier said primly. “And as you can see, I’m no worse for wear despite that storm.”

The man laughed. Jaskier had half expected it to come out like a shriek, like the ferocity of the blizzard he’d survived, but it did not. It was a pleasant, low laugh, and the man’s storm cloud eyes invited Jaskier to join in. He smiled slightly, but he was too old to be laughing at jokes he didn’t understand just to be polite.

The man came closer, stepping carefully through the thicket to settle at Jaskier’s side. His hand was friendly and warm when he helped Jaskier to sit up, and his bare skin emanated a pleasant heat that made Jaskier want to damn all propriety and curl into his side.

He was still apocalyptically cold, actually, and as if the realization was a trigger, he started violently shivering.

The man frowned, but it was a thoughtful expression. “That’s a good sign,” he said.

“Is it?” Jaskier demanded through chattering teeth. He tilted sideways, yearning for warmth.

“Yes,” said the man. “Your body shakes because it remembers warmth. You may yet live.”

Jaskier made a high pitched, alarmed noise. “May live? _May?_ ” he demanded.

“May,” the man agreed. “Is it true you are a bard?”

Jaskier groped for his lute case, and, finding it, patted it proprietarily. “Who’s asking?”

“Do you not know my name?” the man asked. He smiled a little. “Oh, you come from so very far away, though, don’t you.”

Jaskier wanted to draw back, to get up and walk away, but his legs felt rubbery and he was still shivering violently.

“I play a little,” Jaskier finally allowed, his hand still resting on the lute case.

The man smiled, and it was strange that in his smile he was so similar to Geralt. His teeth were sharp and slightly yellow. Jaskier did pull away then.

“Then,” said the man with the gravitas of a seasoned lecturer, “You shall sing me a song of heartbreak, while your body still knows how to shiver.”

Jaskier opened his mouth to object, but instead, the first syllable of one of the songs about Geralt he’d had to retire after he’d realized he was wallowing was drawn from his throat, surprising and strangling.

The man smiled more broadly and settled back against the frozen bracken with every appearance of comfort and simply watched as Jaskier sang.

And sang.

And sang.

The last note drained from the clearing around them, and Jaskier wondered when that oppressive silence that presaged a snowstorm had settled back around them. The world was muffled, strange.

He didn’t feel cold anymore, and his shivering had stopped, and he fumbled with the clasp for his cloak.

“Ah, no,” the man said, tangling Jaskier’s hands in his to still them. “None of that. You are still alive,” he added, and then he pushed Jaskier back, and back some more, and then settled him on his belly on the frozen ground.

“The north wind,” said the man, “May bring the cold of death and winter. But it is breath. And life. And songs are made up of breath and life.”

Jaskier wanted to get the cloak off, he thought, and soon. He was boiling alive in his layers and layers of clothing, but his limbs wouldn’t cooperate.

“Sleep,” the man said.

***

Geralt felt the storm abate around him quite abruptly. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, not once he’d realized that it wasn’t exactly a natural storm, but it did make the hair on the back of his neck rise.

His medallion was still and silent.

He loosened his silver sword in its scabbard, and cast a wary gaze around the clearing he’d wound up in. The sun was setting, but without the driving snow and wind, he could see just fine.

Able to make out a blaze on one of the tall pines that ringed the clearing, he approached it, and his heart beat faster in his chest.

It wasn’t some coincidence, a woodcutter with a sense of whimsy. The mark— the dandelion— belonged to Jaskier.

It was shallow, and old enough that the bark was flaking from the edges, but he recognized the practiced arc of the “stem”, no matter how long ago it had been cut to mark the trail.

He stared at it for a moment, and then he turned to leave, but his bootheel caught something buried deep in the snow, and he dropped to a crouch to investigate.

A knife, he thought grimly, with an elaborately inlaid hilt and enamel on the blade.

He didn’t know the knife, but the elaborate decoration coupled with the blazed tree meant he knew without a doubt whose knife it was.

“Fuck,” he whispered. He wondered if there had been a missing woodcutter at all, and he cursed the towns and he cursed himself for coming this deep into the mountains to visit them.

A bright fluttering bit of deep russet caught his attention then: a scrap of silk caught in the branches of a thicket just to his right. 

He approached carefully, staying low and crouched, his hand back on the hilt of his sword.

The snow in the thicket was drifted in a strange way. By all rights, the snow shouldn’t have drifted much at all, in the sheltering brush.

He put a gloved hand to the drift, and felt dread seize his muscles and hold them hostage. He shook it off.

The snow came away in sheets of old snowpack, and he very gently scraped them aside until he found wool, and beneath that dark hair, and beneath that, skin that was just starting to turn the blue of cold-sickness. Geralt leaned back, assessing the clearing, ignoring everything about the body in the snow that was familiar ~~and dear~~.

The snow layer would be more insulating than the winter cold, but not for long. He needed fire, and a way to warm the unconscious traveler.

He made quick work of collecting deadfall, and he built the fire in record time, his hands shaking for no reason he cared to dwell on. The second he had the fire built to his satisfaction, he forwent kindling and his tinder box and simply cast igni at the base of it.

The clearing flared with sudden heat, and Geralt might have, on a different day, cursed his own lack of control for the intensity of it, but he needed to unearth that body and lay it close to a warming fire, and that took precedence over everything else.

Fire lit, he went back to the heart of the thicket and scraped away the rest of the snow, his hands still rock-steady and sure, even though a part of him thought they shouldn’t be.

The chest rose with a soft sigh as soon as Geralt laid his hands on the person’s back, and something unclenched in him.

He sighed himself, a harsher echo of the other person’s, and got his hands under the person’s shoulders and hauled him out of the snow.

Once he did that, Geralt was free to cradle the body in his arms and against his chest for the three strides over to the fire, and he did, his heart racing in triple time.

He couldn’t leave the person in his clothes, not with the heat of the fire there to melt the snow and sap what little heat the person still retained, so he stripped the man methodically, not letting his eyes linger on scars whether he knew them or not.

Once the man was wearing only hose of a soft, fine wool, Geralt stripped off his own cloak and the borrowed hat and scarf and wrapped them firmly around the vulnerable body.

That done, he was able to settle on his heels and look, and wonder what the hell Jaskier was doing out here so far past midwinter.

***

Jaskier felt awareness come back to him in waves.

His hands and feet hurt, a deep throbbing pain that he wished he could draw away from, but his coordination was not yet as awake as the pains in his extremities. 

Eventually, he became aware again of his heartbeat, an irregular staccato that pulsed in time to the waves of pain from his limbs.

He breathed, too, and the air that entered his lungs seemed almost heavy, so warm it felt compared to the rest of him. He realized after several moments that the warmth from the air he breathed in also felt synchronous with the pain and his heart.

He remembered, slowly as the dawn, that indeed pulse and pain and breath all worked together in reminding a man he was alive.

That was good then, that he was alive. He wasn’t sure, but he thought perhaps he hadn’t been for awhile.

“Jaskier,” someone said over his head, the gruff, irritated word familiar as the heartbeat he was growing slowly reacquainted with.

He realized that his head was resting on something warm and firm but not hard, and he shifted a little, rubbing his cheek against rough wool.

Cheek, he thought. Face, and cheek, and nose to breathe with, and eyes.

He tried to make his mouth work, or his eyes open, but the cold had sapped too much of his strength.

He sighed instead, and then a hand was adjusting fabric on his head— hat? Had he had a hat? And tucking his hair away.

More fabric was adjusted, careful fingers tucking folds over his face, and Jaskier realized he must be wrapped very thoroughly for there to be warm wool over his mouth and nose, causing the air he breathed to be hot and humid from his own body.

All of this made a certain sense, but Jaskier could not quite pinpoint why.

He finally opened his eyes.

He was facing a fire that burned merrily and warmly, and he saw a covered pot at the edge of it.

He moved his head, looking up, and he saw a black and stained surcote, a glint of metal, and familiar white hair.

“Well,” Jaskier rasped. His throat was dry and scratchy, like he hadn’t used it in decades. He tried again: “At least, since you’re wearing a shirt, I can be sure it’s truly you.”

Geralt’s hand rested warmly on top of Jaskier’s hat. “When did I get a hat?” he asked.

There were a lot of details he wasn’t clear on, but that seemed the safest. Questions like ‘How did you find me in the middle of a blizzard when you should be tucked up safely in your winter fortress’ and ‘Are you sure petting my head is part of curing the cold-sickness’ would probably not win him any points, and he could guess the answers anyway.

There was a hum in his chest, deep and subtle, that he’d always thought meant _Destiny_ , and just then he could feel it more intensely than the various thawing parts of his body.

“When I put it on your head,” Geralt replied evenly.

“Hmm,” Jaskier said. Geralt fidgeted with the thick wool cloak Jaskier was wrapped in, tugging the edge of it up to cover his throat better.

A part of Jaskier wanted to settle under that touch; to bask in longed for warmth and to simply accept the strange inevitability of Geralt’s presence in this clearing.

A larger part of Jaskier needed the details. He’d been born craving knowledge, no matter it’s form, be it gossip or history or anything in between.

“Shouldn’t you be making the journey up to Kaer Morhen right about now?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt stiffened. The play of muscle under Jaskier’s cheek was an interesting phenomenon, and Jaskier unconsciously pressed his head into the suddenly solid thigh a little harder.

“No,” Geralt said. “Far too late for that.”

Jaskier tried to parse that out, but he couldn’t quite figure it.

“Well, obviously,” he said. “If you’re here you’d never be able to make it as far as Kaedwen before the passes close. I thought you didn’t come here? You said they were too superstitious even for a Witcher.”

Geralt shifted under Jaskier, his hands gentle as he kept Jaskier curled along his leg and his upper half in his lap. “Seemed like I should,” he said. “What day is it?”

The non sequitur gave Jaskier pause.

“Hmm. I don’t know exactly, I think I may have lost a day in the storm, but it should be about ten days past the hunter’s moon? Maybe a fortnight past?”

Geralt grunted acknowledgment, but he didn’t reply.

Jaskier was finally starting to feel past the throbbing of his hands and feet, and he wiggled, trying to get comfortable. The cloak he was wrapped in slipped, and he gasped at the bite of cold air. Geralt took his time rewrapping Jaskier, twisting over Jaskier to reach the places the fabric slipped. Jaskier watched the familiar wolf pendant slip out of his shirt and sway above his face, glinting copper and bronze in the firelight.

Geralt spent too long fussing with the cloak, which Jaskier had realized after a few minutes was in fact Geralt’s. He couldn’t see much of the clearing, but he rather hoped his own was hanging on a branch to dry out or some such, because it had been a rather expensive cloak.

“What day is it really?” he asked finally, and Geralt made a noncommittal noise. Jaskier waited.

Geralt settled back and ran his hand over Jaskier’s shoulders. Jaskier wondered if Geralt was capable of admitting to himself he was feeling affectionate, or if he was convinced this was necessary for Jaskier’s health and welfare.

A year ago, the thought might have infuriated him, and the year before that, it would have frustrated him. Now, it made him feel tired, and small, and sad.

He didn’t resist the urge to press back into the offered warmth of the man’s hand, but he also didn’t delude himself into thinking he had any idea what Geralt meant by it.

Sometimes, Jaskier thought that the loneliness that had set up a fortress around Geralt’s heart would drive him to a woman who not only could kill him, but would. Today, Jaskier just hoped that he’d be warmed through before Geralt realized what was going on, panicked, and fled in the night.

Geralt’s thumb was rubbing very gently along the back of Jaskier’s neck when he felt brave enough to ask again: “Why? What day is it really?”

“Crow moon rises in three days.”

Jaskier gasped. He shut his eyes against the glare of the fire and thought about the crazy shirtless not-Geralt spirit-monster-thing and said, with a shaking, tiny voice, “and how many years since we last parted?”

“Two and a half,” Geralt said. “Three in the summer.”

Jaskier nodded, relief flooding him. He could deal with having slept away nearly four months in a magical coma induced by a shirtless monster. He could not deal with sleeping years of his life away.

“What happened?” Geralt asked after several minutes of the fire crackling and his thumb rubbing reassuring circles on the back of Jaskier’s neck.

Jaskier thought about how he could explain what had happened without allowing Geralt to grow convinced that Jaskier had forced the shirtless entity to summon Geralt specifically, and could come up with nothing.

Instead of letting Geralt think Jaskier had trapped him somehow, yet again, he shook his head mutely.

“It was snowing...” Jaskier began, trailing off when even the memory of cold made him shiver and curl more closely around Geralt’s leg. Geralt checked the fit of the hat and laid his hand on Jaskier’s cheek this time. It was warm as a furnace, and the touch as welcome.

***

Geralt wanted to shake Jaskier and demand to know what happened, but he also hated how cold the man’s skin still was under his very sensitive fingertips.

He knew the stew he had going in the pot would warm him faster, but he also knew that pushing that too soon would make him sick. Especially after four months of sleep.

He considered that. There had been the strange buzz from his medallion as he’d followed the mad impetus of the storm to arrive in this particular clearing, which he had contemplated earlier and dismissed.

He wasn’t sure now, but he thought he hadn’t heard Jaskier’s breath or his heartbeat until he’d gotten through the snowpack to touch Jaskier, and then there had been that sigh and the sluggish heartbeat of the nearly dead.

And if Jaskier couldn’t even attempt to recollect the event without getting chilled again—

Geralt wondered if there might not be a cold spirit after all, and suddenly he remembered the missing woodcutter.

He’d been hired to complete a contract, after all, and once again Jaskier had gotten in the way of the Path.

Jaskier’s fingers were dug tightly into his trouser leg, and Geralt knew that wouldn’t be ideal for returning circulation, so he took the other man’s hand in his own and gently smoothed the fingers out so they were lax in his hand.

The skin was bright red, which boded well, and Geralt tried to think of any monster he knew that could inflict a deathlike sleep for months through the worst of winter without any more harm than this. He kept up his careful examination of Jaskier’s fingers as his mind picked up and discarded various ideas.

The Fae, maybe, he thought as he ran his fingertips over Jaskier’s callouses. They were as hard as ever, and Geralt supposed that meant that he hadn’t aged in his enchanted sleep, since Geralt highly doubted that the lute he’d found under similarly deep drifts just to the west of his wayward bard had seen any use during the winter.

Jaskier said nothing, which was unusual, his gaze locked on Geralt’s face, which was not.

Something like the Fae, perhaps, but not a member of the Court. The Fae wouldn’t save Jaskier for nothing at all, he knew.

And maybe the cold spirit the village elder had named was just waiting for his payment? It had seen Jaskier safely delivered to Geralt, after all, and Geralt knew that he owed the monster for that much at least.

He tried to imagine Jaskier sleeping here for years, for an eternity, with Geralt never finding him because Vesemir hadn’t kicked him out last winter. His chest felt tight and awful at the thought.

He mentally calculated— he had the hide from the winter hare he’d caught, and its organ meat, as he’d decided against adding the extra sustenance in favor of Jaskier’s preference for avoiding it. He’d justified it to himself that the village was only two hours away, and Jaskier could stuff himself there if there wasn’t adequate nutrition in the stew from the lean winter hunt.

He had very little to offer, but then, he was a Witcher. He knew the value of exchange, of contracts, because so few people honored theirs to him.

He sighed, and Jaskier shifted against his leg. Geralt tucked the hand he’d been checking carefully under his cloak, against Jaskier’s chest, and checked the hat’s fit again. It was too large for Jaskier’s head and kept slipping away to let the heat carried by Jaskier’s blood to his brain be stolen by the winter night, which could be disastrous at this point.

“Coin for your thoughts, Witcher?” Jaskier asked. Geralt sighed again.

“Not worth that.”

Jaskier was still watching him, his regard a careful, heavy thing that made Geralt’s skin crawl. From anyone else, he thought he might have left already: certainly Jaskier was well enough to survive the night, and the town near enough that he’d be fine once morning hit. And there was still the matter of the missing woodcutter.

If he was indeed missing.

Jaskier made a dismayed noise. “Really, Geralt. I know you do so enjoy depriving me of my few simple pleasures, but it’s been months since I had the joy of human conversation, and now you’re going to deny me that too?”

Geralt froze. Jaskier was… well. Jaskier was _Jaskier_ , and he thought how very little he deserved that. From Jaskier specifically, and from anyone at all. He was a Witcher. He killed monsters, for coin.

There wasn’t really a place for a bright, brilliant bard who stared at his face like it held any kind of answers and who asked him for his thoughts and not his sword.

“Got something I need to do,” Geralt said. “You’re warm enough now; stick close to the fire. When you get hungry, there’s stew. Eat.”

He considered what kind of timeline he should give for his return, and then he considered that Jaskier had slept for months before Geralt had found him, and he shook his head instead.

“You should head back to Byi once the sun rises. You can follow your trail back out to the road and then follow it to the north once you find it.”

Jaskier raised an eyebrow at him, already carefully gathering himself back away from Geralt, keeping himself bundled in Geralt’s cloak.

Which made sense, because Geralt’s cloak was dryer, and even though wool stayed warm when wet, Geralt wasn’t about to offer wet gear to someone as sick as Jaskier had been when there was dry gear available. Still, he couldn’t go out with only a surcote in weather like this, so as he grabbed his swords, he also took Jaskier’s damp cloak from where he’d hung it to dry and tossed it over his shoulders. Jaskier and he shared a height, but Jaskier’s shoulders were only the breadth of a normal man’s, so the yellow cloak would only protect one of his sides. He didn’t care.

Jaskier was still watching him; still silent. Geralt pretended this mattered to him not at all, and departed the clearing in the direction that he’d felt his medallion warn him about hours ago without another word.

***

Jaskier watched Geralt leave. He wanted to laugh at the ridiculous figure the Witcher cut in Jaskier’s cloak, the autumnal goldenrod doing absolutely nothing for Geralt’s pale and slightly inhuman complexion, but he knew if he so much as snickered, Geralt would be upset.

He was in that sort of mood, Jaskier could tell. Something was weighing at him, nipping at his thoughts so he couldn’t let it drop, and Jaskier had long since learned that it was probably wiser to let it be.

And now, with the terrible burden of experience behind him, he knew that his heart couldn’t handle the consequences if he didn’t take the wiser course in a case like this.

He didn’t wallow in his thoughts of the past now any more than he had allowed himself to wallow in the last year—plus four months now, and that was certainly something he didn’t want to think about. Instead he settled as close to the fire as he dared and tried to comfort his cold body with the memory of Geralt holding him and touching him so carefully just minutes before.

Eventually, he grew bored. The stew was more than ready for eating, and he filled his belly slowly, pausing when it twisted and grumbled in protest over the sudden addition of food after so long without, not wanting to be sick and potentially contaminate the campsite. Geralt would be livid, probably with himself more than anything, for assuming Jaskier was capable of handling himself.

That didn’t stifle the feelings of bored restlessness either, though, so he looked for his lute.

This misadventure had the makings of a good song, he thought, and there may as well be some good out of having Destiny or that shirtless deity or whomever drop Geralt right on top of him again to be grumpy and taciturn in Jaskier’s direction until Jaskier got fed up with everything and left.

And Jaskier had already decided, this time, it would be he who left Geralt, and not the other way around.

The bastard didn’t get to control their relationship anymore, since he clearly had now idea how to handle such responsibility.

The image of Geralt in Jaskier’s cloak filled his mind’s eye, and he did laugh now, confident that the man was far enough away that he couldn’t hear.

The lute was in its case, propped up against a tree near enough the fire that the warmth might have gotten back into the wood.

He opened the case a bit warily, praying that only the strings might be affected by its adventure in the elements, that the veneer would still be intact and the soundbox unsoured by cracks from shrunken wood.

To his profound surprise, the lute was fine. It gleamed as if recently oiled, and the strings were detuned but, to Jaskier’s practiced touch, still sound.

He looked around the clearing, half expecting to see— well.

He pulled it free from its case and started to carefully tune it with a practiced ear. The mellow sound of a slightly discordant string warped in his mind to the howl of a sentient winter wind.

Within minutes, he had the first line down, and he was trying to make a couplet with the second that implied that the wind had not just thoughts and desires, but sensual thoughts and desires, when a man strode into the clearing.

He was a normal man, neither Witcher nor spirit of winter winds and blizzards and breath of life and breath of song; Jaskier remembered, and maybe old age had made him more reverent or maybe a god of the north wind held more awe for him than a king with a broken crown. 

He wore brown homespun under a cloak of dark red dyed very slightly unevenly. His boots were oiled suede instead of tanned leather, which meant he was local to the area and smart enough not to risk his boots getting cracks in them to let in cold and wet.

“Hello, traveller!” Jaskier called cheerily, strumming seamlessly into a drinking song he knew was popular around this part of the Continent.

“I’m no traveller,” the other man said. “I’m Ari. Got caught under my own tree until the blizzard loosened it, and then I waited for dawn. Alone, I thought, until I followed your song and saw your fire.”

“Well,” Jaskier said. “Traveller or not, I wouldn’t turn any honest soul away from my fire, though I am forced to confess that I share it with a Witcher already.”

He wasn’t yet up to much actual activity, but his fingers tightened on his lute and he made his face stay blank and neutral, waiting for the reply.

The man hesitated. “Truly?” he asked warily. “A Witcher shares a camp and a fire with … well. An ordinary fellow like yourself?”

Jaskier shrugged eloquently. He could have said more; pointed out that said Witcher had shared far more than a fire with Jaskier, now and over the last decades, but Jaskier didn’t think it would matter either way if he drew the man’s attention to the dark, ichor stained cloak around Jaskier’s shoulders, and the packs with his precious potions on the ground next to the tree Jaskier’s lute case was propped against.

Ari finally seemed to make up his mind, and he settled on the dry ground near Jaskier, facing the fire. “I don’t suppose you have energy to share a song now that you know your audience?”

Jaskier accepted the change of subject away from his ability and desire to have a Witcher for a companion, and strummed into a song about summer.

He wasn’t the sort to risk playing half finished compositions in front of an unappreciative audience.

***

Geralt had a lot easier time following Jaskier’s marked trail away from the clearing than he had coming in. His medallion started humming after a few furlongs, as he reckoned it: perhaps halfway to the road.

To his surprise, he saw what he was looking for directly from the nearest marked tree. The cairn was in an old style, and built by hands long since gone from the world.

His medallion buzzed urgently against his chest and he closed his fingers around it in an old habit as he closed the distance to the place of power.

As soon as he was at the cairn, he dropped to his knees. It was not an altar, but he had no idea what had saved Jaskier, and he owed whatever used this thing as a locus more than he had to give. This was the only way he could come up with to repay whatever debt might have accrued.

He unrolled the hare’s hide, thick with winter fur as fine as silk and warm as wool, and pulled the organ meat from where he’d tucked it within. He laid all of that out in a ritual form more appropriate to a southern climate.

After a moment’s hesitation, he opened his pouch and pulled out a dull coin, one of his last, and set it down.

He looked up, wondering how one called a spirit of the cold, and saw a man sitting on the crosspiece of the cairn.

He was shirtless, and pale and muscled as Geralt himself was, with fanged teeth that rather favored the great northern bears than a wolf. Abruptly, Jaskier’s comment about Geralt being real and fully clothed made complete sense.

The wind nipped sharply at his exposed skin and tugged at his hair, and Geralt simply regarded the… being. Creature was not appropriate, he thought, nor monster.

He still thought of the Fae, but no Fae would have borne Geralt’s silent regard for more than a heartbeat.

“Keep your coin,” he advised after a moment. “And the hare. I’ve already been paid, as you might mark it.”

Geralt felt colder than the wind tugging at his hair could account for, thinking of what Jaskier might have bartered, mad with cold-sickness.

The cold spirit shook his head. “It’s no wonder you broke the musician’s heart, Witcher,” he said. “If you can’t think of a thing I might want from a traveling bard. Don’t you know what the wind is?”

Geralt simply stared at him, anger and horror pricking at his guts and his lungs, so each breath came only with effort.

He touched Geralt’s chest, over the medallion, but Geralt knew he didn’t care about mere silver with the memory of magic minted into its core.

The wind howled around him, louder and bitter, shrieking the chorus to a song Geralt had heard a dozen bards sing, a heartbreaking bit of music that he couldn’t quite recall the words to.

Then, the spirit looked merely sad. “Your man owes me nothing, and so neither do you, Witcher. The balance remains, and spring will be here soon enough that the north wind is only a memory. Return to the comforts you pretend you don’t seek.”

Geralt didn’t move.

The spirit tapped the skin over Geralt’s sternum, then stood, towering over Geralt as he knelt.

“I am well paid, Geralt of Rivia, and you should know better than to argue with the north wind.”

Then he was gone.

Geralt stared at the offering he’d brought and for one stubborn second he considered leaving it.

The wind still shrieked around him though, another sound echoing in its howls, this one a song he knew had been Jaskier’s punishment for what Geralt had said to him. It had echoed even in the brothels who’d always been friendly to a Witcher’s coin and kept them from taking his custom for the last two years.

 _Bastard_ , he thought, remembering, but that was part of what made Jaskier so very much himself. Spite drove the man to lengths few would bother with, and passion drove him even further.

Few were as alive as Jaskier was always even on their best days.

***

Ari remained wary, even as he ate the stew the bard Jaskier offered and sat close to him at the fire. Between songs, Jaskier had warned him away from the Witcher’s things, but he had never seemed even a little concerned.

They hadn’t much occasion to meet Witchers, this side of the mountains, and that was fine, as his people had their gods to protect them from the foul things in the world. There were always rumors and stories, though, of this Witcher eating a child still screaming for her mother, of that Witcher murdering an entire town, and so on.

Jaskier didn’t play any of the songs he would expect to hear from a bard who camped with a Witcher, but Ari was appreciative of the bright, cheerful tunes that staved off the closing darkness. He was grateful, of course, for the blizzard that moved the tree that had fallen wrong and trapped him, but the blizzard itself might have killed him instead and he still felt chilled to his bones.

He missed his wife and the shelter of the turf house his great grandfather had built that he shared with his daughter and her family.

The bard with his music and the roaring fire wasn’t the same, exactly, but it was better than three days spent eating snow and growing hungrier and colder and more certain of his death with every passing minute, so Ari relaxed and tried not to worry about the absent Witcher.

The sun was just peeking over a grey horizon when the Witcher returned. He was huge and hulking with shoulders at least twice as broad as Ari’s, and strange pale hair and eyes that gleamed yellow in the firelight.

Far from intimidating, however, he looked ludicrous, as he was wearing a yellow cloak that was half his proper size.

Ari watched as he made straight for Jaskier and grabbed a knit cap from the ground, cramming it on the other man’s head.

“You nearly died of cold. Wear the damned hat.”

Ari… well. That was hardly what Ari had expected even the sort of Witcher who shared a camp with a bard to do, and he watched avidly as Jaskier stuck out his tongue childishly and then strummed a few bars.

“This is Ari,” Jaskier said, and Geralt grunted acknowledgement without looking up.

“Woodcutter?” he asked, and Ari fought the fear that seized his throat at that knowledge— how could the Witcher know?

“Oh, so that’s why you were so far off the road, you big lummock. And here I thought you’d finally given in to the inevitable and made that witch of yours give you a charm to find me.”

“That’s not going in your song,” the Witcher said flatly.

Jaskier laughed, leaning close to the Witcher’s ear and whispering loudly, “too late!”

Ari would have laughed if he wasn’t so frightened.

The Witcher reached for Jaskier, and Ari held his breath, but the Witcher merely pressed the back of his hand to Jaskier’s cheek a moment before saying “You’re still too cold. And I know you didn’t sleep.”

He cast a glare in Ari’s direction then, and Ari wilted under the pressure of it.

“May as well get back to town, since the woodcutter’s with us.”

“Excellent.” Jaskier bounced to his feet, and Ari stood as well, still wary. The Witcher packed away the lute and shouldered it, which Jaskier didn’t protest, and then he pointed imperiously at the clothes spread out near the fire to dry, which made Jaskier sigh and shrug partly out of his cloak to dress in them. 

“Some of these are still wet,” Jaskier complained, just as Ari realized why the Witcher wore such a silly cloak— he’d given his to the bard, and kept the smaller, less suitable one for himself.

He found, suddenly, that the Witcher wasn’t nearly so intimidating as the stories made him out to be.

He gathered his pack and moved closer to where Jaskier was sorting out clothing and putting on several more layers.

Once Jaskier had packed his things into a bag, the Witcher grabbed that and shouldered it as well, so he was laden with his own things and the bard’s dangling from his shoulders, and Jaskier was unburdened and wrapped securely in a black cloak with a too-large knit cap slipping dangerously backwards.

The Witcher fixed Jaskier’s hat again without any indication of impatience, and Ari knew he wasn’t imagining the affectionate way the Witcher’s hands lingered near Jaskier’s ears.

No wonder the bard was happy to share a camp with a Witcher, if the Witcher loved him, he thought.

And if Witchers could love, they probably weren’t at all like the monsters in the tales he’d heard.

***

When the village finally came into sight, Jaskier grinned and hopped a little. “Civilization!” he exclaimed. “Do you think they’ll let us stay long enough to dry our clothes, Geralt? I mean, you did heroically save their woodcutter,” he added with a sly smile.

Ari, who had kept pace with them with a lot less complaining that Jaskier ever managed, looked slightly constipated at that. Jaskier sort of doubted the man would argue with Jaskier in front of Geralt, but it was clear he didn’t like the version of events Jaskier had just implied.

Jaskier winked at him.

Geralt made a disapproving noise. “He’s married, bard,” he said suppressively. 

“And I’m sure his wife is as lovely as he is,” Jaskier agreed, winking again. Ari looked even less thrilled with that line of discussion than the one before, and Geralt swatted the back of Jaskier’s head.

“Fine, but you did still wander around the woods looking for him, and you’re owed at least half what you contracted for,” Jaskier said briskly.

Geralt was a very particular sort of quiet at that proclamation, and Jaskier stopped short, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You didn’t!” he exclaimed.

Geralt made a non-committal noise.

“How many times do you have to let yourself get fucked over by a town before you remember to agree on a price before haring off into the woods after a monster, Geralt of Rivia! Did that Witcher keep of yours not teach common sense?”

“In a blizzard,” Ari supplied. Both of them turned to face him, surprised.

“What?” Jaskier asked.

“In order for the Witcher to have been out that far and set up the camp when you said he had, that means he left town while the blizzard was still blowing.”

“What?!” Jaskier demanded, rounding on Geralt. “And how, exactly, did you intend to track the monster that supposedly took Ari here in the middle of a storm.”

Geralt held up both hands. “Jaskier—“

Then, a lovely woman emerged from the largest of the houses in the small village of Byi, her hair loose and gently moving in the wind.

“Oh, you made it!” she said, sounding profoundly relieved. “I’m sorry,” she added. “I didn’t think it wanted you, specifically.”

“I found what it wanted me to find,” Geralt said, and Jaskier remembered the shirtless spirit or god or monster who had wanted him to sing all over again.

Jaskier wanted to close the distance between himself and Geralt, and more. He wanted to rest his cheek on Geralt’s thigh, and feel the warmth of his hands on the back of his neck or wrapped around his own hand again.

The woman nodded. “Come inside,” she said. “You can’t be very warm.”

“We aren’t,” Jaskier declared. “Thank you for your generous hospitality, madame,” he added, flourishing a bow at her that made her cheeks pinken.

Geralt closed the distance between them and hauled Jaskier up by the scruff of his neck, dragging him into the turf house.

The front room had a fireplace with a round chimney that angled up oddly.

Geralt let go of him and immediately began unpacking their things, hanging everything on hooks nailed into the chimney so that it stood a chance of drying. Reluctantly, Jaskier divested himself of Geralt’s cloak, and then he stripped back down to his hose, hesitated, and then stripped further, so he was standing naked in front of the fire, basking in the very welcome warmth.

Geralt snorted and then slapped his flank to move him.

“Hey!” Jaskier protested. “I was asleep, outside, in winter, for four months!”

Geralt leaned around him to hang his surcote up next to Jaskier’s smalls.

“You were in an enchanted sleep,” Geralt pointed out calmly. “You didn’t notice the cold.”

Jaskier shivered. He’d noticed.

Geralt lingered close for a long moment, and then he pulled back and turned toward the door just before the village head woman entered.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

Jaskier could feel the slight shift in Geralt’s posture as he inclined his head toward her.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Byi is grateful for your service.”

“Three days provisioning,” Jaskier piped in, turning to face her, only remembering his nudity at the last second.

Not important.

Her eyes flicked down his body, then back over to Geralt after a second’s appraisal.

“For both of us,” Geralt added.

She nodded. “Of course. I only wish we could offer coin as well. Ari told me the blizzard freed him, and I know…”

She trailed off, glancing between them again. “I know the storm only came because you were called. We are very grateful.”

She nodded once, then took herself through the room and into the private living area that was walled off from this one.

Jaskier found a cushion and nudged it into place just in front of the fire.

“What the fuck,” he said conversationally. Geralt responded with a hum, and dropped down next to Jaskier, eschewing anything so mundane as a cushion to sit on.

Then, to Jaskier’s surprise, Geralt manhandled him back down into the position he’d woken up in hours before, so his cheek was on Geralt’s thigh and his leg was a line of warmth down Jaskier’s front.

He let Geralt manipulate his position in his customary silence, and thought, _You haven’t even bothered to apologize, you utter_ **bastard**.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again,” he complained instead, and he wished the sentiment wasn’t sincere.

Geralt didn’t respond in words, but his hand on Jaskier’s back was warm and firm and very much present, which was about all anyone could expect of Geralt, really.

As the fire warmed the room but not Jaskier, he hummed a few lines of the song he was already writing, working on making “the snow crisp and new/ the foul wind blew” have the proper scansion for the musical motif he already knew was exactly right.

Geralt leaned forward, then pulled back, and Jaskier knew even before the distinct whine of a sharpening stone against steel filled the room, that he’d tired of being idle too.

“Where are you headed, after Byigd?” Jaskier asked, still playing with the lyric, his fingers moving slightly to echo the music on Geralt’s leg in lieu of his lute.

“Hmm,” Geralt replied, shifting again and then tucking Jaskier closer. “I assumed you’d want to return to Oxenfurt.”

“What?” Jaskier asked, somewhat startled from the music preoccupying his mind.

“Unless you were planning on recovering somewhere else,” Geralt said. “I can escort you to Lettenhove instead, I suppose. Or anywhere you’d like, really. Not much work for a Witcher, this early in the year.”

Jaskier snorted. “Yes, and don’t think I won’t have the explanation of your presence here instead of properly ensconced at Kaer Morhen out of you. But I have no need to be anywhere in particular,” he added. “So if you’re going to accompany me, you’ll need to suggest some destinations.”

Geralt didn’t reply, and Jaskier didn’t press him, content to return to his music for the moment.

He was nearly asleep when Geralt offered him the knife he’d been sharpening, hilt first, and when he closed his fingers around the familiar jewels and elaborate decoration, he swore under his breath. He’d found the damned thing under months of snowpack and brought us back for Jaskier, and _sharpened_ the benighted thing.

It felt strangely heavy in his hand.

He sat up.

Geralt was an utter bastard of course; it was part of why Jaskier liked him. But he was also a gentleman, in the secret parts of his heart that he had kept hidden away out of need for most of his long life, and Jaskier had convinced himself to forget that.

But he couldn’t, could he? Or why else had Geralt been able to break his heart deeply enough to have him wallowing about it for over a year?

He snorted in disgust, mostly with himself, and he grabbed a now-dry shirt and his smalls to dress in.

“Is there anyone in that keep of yours in the summer?” he demanded.

Geralt blinked at him, then answered, “Not often.”

“Then I suppose we can find ourselves work for awhile, and then I’d like to have words with your kin about your abysmal manners,” Jaskier said primly.

Geralt watched him, carefully not moving at all.

“And when do I get to complain to your family about you?” he asked finally.

Jaskier dismissed that with an imperious flick of his fingers. “Perhaps when I am warm again.”

Geralt frowned, suddenly serious and looking concerned. “It will be cold in Kaer Morhen.”

“Then I’ll buy a better cloak,” Jaskier said. “But don’t worry, I know you like this one quite a bit, so I shall be very generous indeed and allow you to keep it.”

Geralt shook his head, and then he leaned forward and brushed Jaskier’s hair out his eyes.

“Finish that song. You know I don’t like it when they’re half finished and still manage to ring in my head for hours.”

Jaskier huffed, but he obediently reached for his lute and worked out the fingering for the start of the chorus.

_sleep, he told me, before you forget warmth_

_sleep, he told me, as payment for worth_

**Author's Note:**

> I appreciate and adore everyone involved in the making of this fic. You know who you are. <3


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